Don't forget to order your supplies for this year's International BookCrossing Day (April 21)! The last day to order them is March 25, because we'll need time to get them to you before the big day arrives. And this year's labels were designed by Azuki and they're great. So don't miss out, get your orders in while you can!

Can members volunteer to help with this? I only make requests concerning my 'pet' crossing zone but there is a lot more clean-up that could be done within Greater London - I keep finding duplicate zones.

I don't know how many people have region-editing privs, or whether they're on vacation or snowed in and without internet {wry grin}, but it does seem that the last few requests haven't been dealt with. I took care of a few just now.

Can members volunteer to help with this? I only make requests concerning my 'pet' crossing zone but there is a lot more clean-up that could be done within Greater London - I keep finding duplicate zones.

When I became a volunteer several years ago, I seem to remember that it was generally agreed amongst the volunteers that, individually, we would restrict our activities to the countries we lived in or countries that we knew extremely well. It's easy to make mistakes when you have little to no knowledge of local geography, landmarks, businesses or local customs. For that reason, I tend to limit my activities to Australia.

If I see a request for another country, I will leave it for a while to see if another volunteer with local knowledge picks it up. If it seems that nobody else is looking at it, I will try to help but only with very obvious things like duplicate cities. Even then, I will double check to make sure that, for example, there isn't actually two separate cities called Los Angeles in California!

It helps if there's something like a website to verify a business name, address etc for crossing zones. Of course, this double-checking means that it takes longer for an "out-of-towner" to update information that might seem glaringly obvious to a local.

And then there's the whole area of countries that use non-Roman alphabets. Greek, Russian and Asian languages are a real minefield for mono-linguists like myself!

I mostly stick to my region, and occasionally take on merging of obviously duplicate zones per forum requests. When it comes to regions & languages & scripts I don't know, I prefer to leave those to somebody who knows what they are doing within the region.